


like a bad sequel with a higher budget

by vilecreatures



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Ableist Language, Bisexuality, Degradation, F/M, Humiliation, Implied unspecified abuse, Light BDSM, Local fuckup snares grade A sexmom, Lots of stuff about hands and saying yes to each other, Shifting POV but mainly Roman, Under-negotiated Kink, Verbal Humiliation, Work wife to wife wife, plot? I don't know her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-03 01:14:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21170987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vilecreatures/pseuds/vilecreatures
Summary: Roman tries to figure some shit out.





	like a bad sequel with a higher budget

**1.**

They’re in her hotel room, huddled around the speakerphone, on the line with the head honchos at Ullman. The deal isn’t moving as fast as they need it to, which sucks in the general scope of things but is pretty fucking unbeatable in how it’s activated Gerri’s killer mode, all steely voice and manner, rigid assurance and control.

There’s nothing deep or masculine about her tone. Rather, it’s the way in which she’s learned to use the natural gentleness of her voice to her advantage. Instead of killing that girlish side of herself, she’s leaned in to being underestimated, soothing men and their egos. Cutting them down with a quiet comment or look over the rim of her glasses that they don’t even notice. Roman always notices. Pays a surprising amount of attention given how pathologically uninvested, how scatterbrained he knows he can be.

Listening to her now is like a soothing bathtime of sugary murder. He feels like a praying mantis, immobilized while she slices up his gooey insides.

She doesn’t acknowledge the tent in his pants until after they hang up the call, frowning at him, “Really, Roman?”.

“Look, it isn’t my fault we’ve Pavloved my dick into jumping to attention every time you give out a tongue-lashing.”

He feels hyped, restless, bouncing off the walls; wants to slay a dragon, wants to cower in a cave from a dragon, wants to get fucked by a dragon.

“Rome?” She covers his hands with hers. They’re the same size. “Just stop for now, we have work to do. You can twitch and squirm to your heart’s content later,” her eyes stopping him before he makes the obvious joke.

**2.**

Sex, or as close as he gets to it, is often better with men. It’s easier for him to be passive, unquestioned. Adds a thicker layer of shame to help him along.

Roman sometimes thinks of his sexual history like that old joke about the couple who can’t conceive going to their doctor for help, and it turns out the dumbfuck husband thinks that sex is sticking his dick in her ear.

Are he and Gerri having sex?

(Were the things that were done to him sex?)

**3.**

He’s mouthing at her soft breasts through her bra, slobbering, getting the fabric sticky-wet until he can see a dark nipple starting to peak. He feels her eyes on him, assessing, finding him coming up short. Her gaze and her insults tether him, keep him present and aroused, a red-hot line of shame humming through the core of him, lighting up his dick.

He needs and needs and needs. (approval) (purpose) (direction)

“Now clean up the mess you’ve made, chop chop.”

**4.**

He tries to joke his way towards understanding this thing they’ve settled into, caustic and sincere in his insincerity:

“Look, now that you’re my sexmom or whatever-”

“I prefer ‘mentor’.”

“Was this all a part of our corporate mentoring program?! Will my splooging on your carpet be on record in my personal development file? Do I get to ‘360 eval’ you? _Ms. Kellman’s ‘carrot’ is working well but I’m still waiting for her to show me what she can do with her ‘stick’_-”

“Roman," she cuts him off, refusing him a reply, "hush now, it’s wind-down time.”

He hates how much even that does it for him; hates to think of why. Except maybe, with this, with Gerri, it can just be. He can get what he needs without having to look at it. Focus on the stillness that she can raise in him, tending his body towards a calm he’s never been able to create in himself.

He could never have asked for this, and she never makes him.

**5.**

Roman, the dumbfuck punchline.

Roman, with the parade of 30-under-30, business-Barbie, Vanity-Fair girlfriends he doesn’t know how to fuck. A dog, trying to do it people-style.

**6.**

He’s so close. He feels greedy for pleasure, no need to be anything else, just a walking hard-on, a cock for Gerri to bat away, maybe a hole for her to fuck one of these days if he earns it.

**7.**

“Good god, you ejaculate easily”, she comments, throwing him a box of tissues. “Does a stiff breeze make you pop off too? The last thing Waystar needs is a public indecency scandal fed by your leaky little dick.”

“I’m sorry that the Cialis brigade has dashed your expectations of virility, Ger”, he shoots back, mopping ineptly at the mess in his crotch, “I’m working with newer equipment than the zombie sea-slug horde of limp and lame octogenarians that make up your usual hareem.”

“You know, we should borrow one of our screenwriters to workshop some better dialogue with you, give them a break from putting military propaganda in the mouths of space turtles.”

“Oh yeah? Write us up into a steamy little bean-flicking summer romp? Who would be playing me in this R-rated masterpiece? They’d need to be able to harness my unrestrainable charisma and boyish good-looks... Sebastian Stan? Timothée Chalamet?”

“Andy Serkis?”

“Oh fuck off”, he lets out a giggle, fond and open, face still soft with pleasure.

“No one busts my balls like you do,” then, grinning too widely at the joke he can’t resist, “no one empties them like you do either”.

She scratches sudden and hard across the skin of his calf, earning a delighted yelp. It’s easier than acknowledging the truth beneath his words, the part they don’t usually say out loud.

**8.**

He’s always fidgeting, ill-at-ease in his skin, squirming like a child learning how to sit still, struggling to when their legs don’t yet reach the floor. She makes him feel still. He wants to pour all his energy into her, into what they’re making together.

**9.**

“You need it very badly, don’t you?” Gerri asks him, his head face-down in her lap, her hands rubbing soothing motions into his scalp.

“Yes,” he manages to force out, hips twitching in jerky, squirming little motions as he thrusts down into her mattress.

“Humping the bed like a sex-starved brat. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

He can smell her wetness through her skirt and nylons. His mouth feels heavy, unfucked, he wonders if she’d ever let him use his tongue on her.

He feels the hand petting his hair pause, her fingers twist through the strands and dragging his head up until he’s looking her in the eyes.

“Answer me when I address you, Roman.”

“Yes”, he forces out, his breath catching in short pants, “yes”, “yes”.

“God, you can’t focus on anything but sliming all over me, can you? Can’t think of anything but that insistent little worm between your legs.”

He hears himself let loose a high pitched whine, beyond dignity, beyond language. Gerri gives him four fingers to nip at, to suck on, leaning over his body to reach his lower back. She presses her other hand in hard above his ass, limiting his range of movement and giving him something to rock back against, to moor him. He feels sandwiched by her body, her stomach pressing against the top of his head, her lap underneath his face. Being held like that finishes it for him, his cock hot and spurting until the fine hairs on his stomach feel sticky with cum.

He gives a muffled whine when Gerri tries to pull her fingers out of his mouth, and chooses not to infer a huff of laughter from the way her body shakes around him.

When he comes back to earth, he finds that there’s a dark blue worry buzzing under the surface of his skin. He feels foolish, but is still light-headed enough to ask regardless, “do you really think I’m too needy?”

She pauses, finds his eyes, checks he’s really asking.

“I think you’ve often been needful of the wrong things. I also think you’re going a way towards turning that around.”

She offers a smile, giving him permission to do the same. The warmth of her praise washes over him like honey, like a golden shower from a five-star hooker, like stepping out of a climate-controlled car into the muggy haze of a true summer’s day.

**10.**

It’s just that he feels something when they volley at each other.

She steers him steady.

Gerri, an alchemist, manifesting gold from the shit offering he brings to her.

**11.**

He’s always clowning in her eye-line, mugging for the camera, a dog dancing on its hind legs for treats.

“You know, you don’t need to tap-dance in a tutu all the time, Rome, sometimes there’s a merit to silence, to contemplation”.

“But it makes you laugh-”, automatic, honest, his eyes turning sad, “unless...”

She cuts him off, puts him out of his misery; “Yeah, it makes me laugh, Rome, but you don’t have to be a round-the-clock Netflix special to get my attention, okay? You already have it”.

**12.**

“You’re... aroused too, right? This arouses you?”

He watches her roll her eyes. “Yes, Rome”.

“Do you want me to...-“

“When have you known me to want anything that I didn’t go after in one way or another? Maybe if I thought your twitchy little ass could concentrate on something other than your own gratification for more than five minutes, I’d let you try.”

“I _can_ focus,” he says, a hairsbreadth away from pouting.

“Show me,” she says, maneuvering him until he’s sitting Indian-style at the foot of her bed. Taking his hands with purpose, she turns them and places them, palm-upward, to rest atop of his thighs. “Show me how still, how focused you can be.” He watches her get up, fetch two tumblers of water from her en-suite, and return to him to place them on the flats of his outstretched hands.

“Don’t spill any,” she commands him, walking back over to where her iPad is charging, settling down against the headboard.

“What are you-“

“And don’t talk. Just focus and be still. We said five minutes; let’s see if you can give me that.”

Roman tries to keep a timer running in his head but his thoughts won’t stop shouting for dominance. The worst thing would be to fuck up an order this simple, this easily achievable. He needs Gerri to know that he can do this. The glasses aren’t heavy; their steadying weight only a trick of the mind.

He holds himself still.

He waits.

She isn’t even looking at him.

His traitorous, fucked-up body is getting hot from her not looking at him.

His arms start to tense, his palms trembling under the strain of keeping them level. He tries to think of them as the wings of a plane, buoyant and balanced, moving with the air, not fighting it. He thinks that the metaphor tracks, he isn’t a plane expert.

He lasts a while; he lasts no time at all; no way of knowing from where he sits on the floor, stretching outside of time.

When the glass resting on his left palm drops to the floor, Gerri comes over to him and sets them both down, taking his hands in hers, rubbing them back to life. Her hands are so warm. He thinks maybe she looks proud.

“Sixteen minutes,” she says, breaking the silence they’ve made.

“Yeah?” he asks, feeling suddenly desperate, frantic, open. He thinks he might be crying.

“Yeah”, she confirms, rising up to kiss his forehead. “Yes”.

**13.**

“Do you think I should break up with Tabs?”

“I don’t know Roman”, she replies, sighing, “what are you asking me?”

“Um, I was pretty clear Ger, unless you’re having a senior moment; should I break up with Tabitha? You know Tabitha – nimble, nightmare bisexual, super handy if you need something fetching from a high shelf, I mean she can summon a maid with a stepladder like nobody’s business.“

“Rome.”

He stares at her, wide-eyed. His eyes are always so fucking wide.

“I think you should discuss with Tabitha whether you should break up with Tabitha.”

**14.**

“It’s like you’re ‘mommy and me’ is all, like, I would not be shocked if next time I see you, Gerri’s got you strapped in a papoose,” Shiv smirks at him, waiting for her blow to land. It doesn’t register. He feels steady, centered.

“Hell yeah, Gerri’s a bossy genius and she owns my dick, what of it, fucklug?”

**15.**

“Up.”

“Hmm?” He gazes up at her from where he’s settled himself down on the floor of her lounge, crinkled lines on his forehead from mischief, not from age.

“Sit up on the couch like a big boy. You’ve got to stop thinking of yourself as a housebroken dog.”

She catches a wave of interest roll over his face, grimaces.

“Jesus, Rome, is there anything that doesn’t turn you on? Gangrene? Leprosy?”

“Nah, you’d still be hot if your limbs were falling off.”

“Christ.”

“You know some would call me ‘romantic’.”

“Is that a pun? How long have you had that one up your sleeve?”

“It’s a new quality.”

**16.**

“You know, one-time I kissed your daughter.”

“One-time, I fucked your dad.”

“Ok great, lovely.” His voice high, fractious.

“Rome...”

“No it really is great, very Greek, very eco-friendly, a fucking efficient, recycled, multi-directional family tree. And at least it’s too late for us to sprout any little six-fingered monstrosities to further complicate the lines.”

She lets the silence hang between them for a moment, fixing him a glance that looks horribly like sympathy.

“Do you want to sit for a while? There are some notes I’ve been meaning to go over with you for the Ullman deal-”

“-is this real?”

“...the Ullman deal?”

“Sure.”

“...Roman.”

“Let’s go through the notes.”

He won’t meet her eyes, hands fidgeting, shoulders turned in on himself.

She pulls out a chair for him, passes the manila folder with her color-coded her thoughts; garish, well-ordered. 

Sometimes she thinks she can’t see any of Logan in him, except that’s not exactly right. Rather he’s shaped like the negative space surrounding Logan; like a flinch; like how water displaces, takes the opposite shape of bodies falling into it, accommodating and reforming around each intrusion.

At last he looks up; his eyes still a question she has the answer to.

“It’s real.”

**17.**

The thing is, it’s kind of fucking perfect.

She was never very good at being a wife. Always at work, always split between where convention told her to be and where she felt powerful, useful, in her element. Logan denounced work/life balance as hippy-dippy, limp-dick, liberal bullshit, which went some way in helping her rationalize it as the way things had to be.

Regardless, Baird was better with the children than she ever was; a _fun dad_, all easy charm and irreproachability, clowning with them on the floor, never missing a nightly bedtime story, in the garden together building elaborate mazes for their tortoise to solve – he always had the time to wait it out with them, spinning a spectator commentary for them to laugh along to. He was a way from perfect, but it’s easy to forgive a father, expectations set so much lower. Sometimes she feels like her most unforgivable act as a mother was not the not being there when the girls were younger, but being here now, when their father isn’t. Of course, her daughters are too well-mannered to ever say so out loud, Baird raised them right.

Try as she might, and she _did_ try, she could never fit the shape of a conventional wife, running the homestead, raising children.

Whatever this thing is with Roman, the shape of what they are to each other is generous. Mentor, lover, friend, boss, family, confidante, confessor, someone in your corner when the shit hits the fan. There is no work/life division for either of them. Fight as he does for her attention, she knows Roman loves to watch her work, loves how competent she is, loves for her to teach him moves she usually dances alone.

If this is what ‘wife’ could mean, she could fit that shape, she thinks.

**18.**

“Yes.”

“Wait... you mean... yes?”

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> it’s like  
you have finally found someone that interests you  
and you get more and more interested  
like a fascinating disease...  
  
it’s better than tv  
to look at someone and feel so much happiness  
your smile a single arrow, quivering in a tree trunk  
  
it’s like……….life is not a punishment  
and sometimes good things happen for no reason?  
I stare and stare at you like you were a distant mountain in a homeopathic video game  
with rare medicinal flowers on it  
  
\- Hera Lindsay Bird  
  
  
I haven't posted fic since LJ, idek, comments are love.  
Succ tumblr: [attackchild.tumblr.com](https://attackchild.tumblr.com/)


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